In the third video, the camera apparently pointed at pavement, he talks about his loneliness, anger and hatred, and announces that the “day of my massacre shall begin.”

“I live a lone life. I live in seclusion and solitude. I hate everyone and everything. But the power of my AR you will all know who I am. I had enough of being told what to do and when to do,” he says. “I had enough of being told that I’m an idiot and a dumbass. You’re all stupid and brainwashed by the political and government programs.”

^ For those who have not yet watched Thor: Ragnorak, there's a bit of a spoiler in there, so be forewarned.

SNIP

I think people see/hear what they want to, M-Quigley, and that, unfortunately, like you wrote, those who already subscribe in-whole to the anti-think simply aren't willing to open their thoughts to the possibility that it's not about the tool, but the person behind it.

It doesn't help matters when the "proRKBA" side of the argument is ready to join the #BanEverything crowd, (excluding guns, of course):

Here in the gun-crazy U.S. of A., politicians engage in plenty of creative rhetoric when it comes to harrumphing about school shootings.

It's easy to see how that comes about. On one hand, they've gotta look eager to do something, anything, to stop another tragedy. But, on the other, they're under intense pressure from the National Rifle Association, which writes hefty lobbying checks and knows how to mobilize its faithful to vote out officeholders who don't fetishize firearms.

But since the recent shooting at Santa Fe High School, that rhetoric has slipped from creative to just plain kooky (maybe a 7.9 on the Kook-a-Meter, give or take). Of course, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick got us rolling on the day of the tragedy when he argued that schools should be redesigned with fewer doors so shooters would be easier to apprehend if they tried to enter.

But, not to be outdone, other politicos — including Dan himself — have piled on more wacky (and gun-free) ideas since then. Let's recap some of the most... ahem... interesting:

Porn: Rep. Diane Black, R.-Tenn., who also happens to be running for governor of her state, recently told a group of pastors that porn is a key reason people keep shooting up schools.

SNIP

Lack of Charter Schools: That's right, if parents could just pull their kids out of public schools, they wouldn't get shot!

SNIP

Video Games: "Psychologists and psychiatrists will tell you that students are desensitized to violence, have lost empathy for their victims by watching hours and hours of violent video games,”

SNIP

Abortion: Yep. Good ol' Dan Patrick again. Ever eager to beat the culture-war drums like he's some kind of Bible-thumping John Bonham, Danny Boy used his recent appearances on TV talk shows to blame abortion for school shootings, saying it desensitizes young people to loss of life.

SNIP

A Culture of Violence: Leave it to incoming NRA President and Iran-Contra bad boy Ollie North to come up with an ingeniously vague catch-all that covers everything else but the availability of guns to explain the recent carnage.

Without a doubt, the post-Judaeo-Christian America is a rotten culture. We can look at any one issue as being a symptom of the disease, but unless we treat the root cause, all the topical ointments we care to apply won't matter a hill of beans.

“A free people claim their rights, as derived from the laws of nature, and not as the gift of their chief magistrate.”-Thomas Jefferson, 1774

Tweed Ring: "...we should have all done more to elected Republicans..." Agreed

Betsy DeVos on Tuesday said the federal commission on school safety set up after a Florida high school shooting will not be looking at the role of guns in school violence.

The education secretary was asked during a congressional hearing whether the panel, which she is chairing, will look at guns in the context of school safety.

“That is not part of the commission’s charge per se,” DeVos told a Senate subcommittee overseeing education spending. “We are actually studying school safety and how we can ensure our students are safe at school.”

In this excellent paper, Dr. Edwin Vieira lays out the very clear constitutional powers of the President, as Commander in Chief, to call forth the militia of we the people into service to execute the laws of the Union. While Dr. Vieira is here focused on calling forth the “unorganized militia” as defined in current federal law, keep in mind that the same clear power also applies to the “organized militia” which is the National Guard, as defined by current federal statutes. Both are part of the militia, and both may be called into service by the President, and in fact, MUST be called into service by President Trump to address the current crisis situation of school shootings. President Trump must call forth ALL of the militia of the several states, and that means the National Guard and the rest of us. All of us.

Last Friday, when I called on President Trump to call the National Guard into federal service to protect schools, I caught flak from some readers who accused me of wanting to use the military in the schools instead of the militia. Face palm. The National Guard IS PART OF THE MILITIA. Yes, it is a “select militia” since it is not made up of all the able bodied citizens of military age, but it is still part of the militia. The rest of the militia is us. But we are truly “unorganized” so while we get organized, what is wrong with President Trump calling forth that part of the militia which is already organized? Nothing. Consider that an emergency stop-gap to augment local LEOs with some boots on the ground, now, and then we can get the “unorganized” militia fully organized and trained. We military and police veterans are a pool of trained Americans who can serve as the second wave, if called up by the President to serve, coming in behind the National Guard to protect the schools and to assist in the training of the third, and final wave, which would be the school staff and teachers themselves.

While I'm not sure I trust POTUS to do the right thing the right way, if he's VERY CLOSELY listening to these two, I'm on board.

“A free people claim their rights, as derived from the laws of nature, and not as the gift of their chief magistrate.”-Thomas Jefferson, 1774

Tweed Ring: "...we should have all done more to elected Republicans..." Agreed

Last Friday, when I called on President Trump to call the National Guard into federal service to protect schools, I caught flak from some readers who accused me of wanting to use the military in the schools instead of the militia. Face palm. The National Guard IS PART OF THE MILITIA. Yes, it is a “select militia” since it is not made up of all the able bodied citizens of military age, but it is still part of the militia. The rest of the militia is us. But we are truly “unorganized” so while we get organized, what is wrong with President Trump calling forth that part of the militia which is already organized? Nothing. Consider that an emergency stop-gap to augment local LEOs with some boots on the ground, now, and then we can get the “unorganized” militia fully organized and trained. We military and police veterans are a pool of trained Americans who can serve as the second wave, if called up by the President to serve, coming in behind the National Guard to protect the schools and to assist in the training of the third, and final wave, which would be the school staff and teachers themselves.

While I'm not sure I trust POTUS to do the right thing the right way, if he's VERY CLOSELY listening to these two, I'm on board.

While a few happy exceptions exist, teenagers are, on the whole, a dark and depressing lot. They do not sleep enough, eat healthily, or bother with developing productive habits. On the contrary, they waste much of their days hunched over a screen, agonizing about their self-image, ignoring their homework, and blaming everyone and everything for their problems. These days, few of them have the luxury of two parents, good friends, or a church community to support them as they cope with the hormonal turbulence of puberty.

Given all this, who can really tell which one is “Evan,” the proverbial teenage mass murderer? Obviously, not a group of students and teachers equipped with a few hours of suicide prevention training. And yet most potential shooters usually act out in some way and have a large amount of documentation on file in the form of disciplinary referrals, behavioral intervention plans, and abysmal report cards that should serve as warnings of suicidal/homicidal tendencies. Frequently, though, this too means nothing. No heart-to-heart “come to Jesus” speech from a concerned adult will fix a broken home. No number of suspensions and “restorative practices” will help a student who is hopelessly lonely. And apparently, no legal authority, however well informed, can stop a young person from illegally acquiring a gun and making bombs. If an angry teenager wants to shoot up a school, he usually can unless he does something obviously stupid.

So if gun control and suicide prevention training can do little to change the situation, what will it take? In order to answer this, society should ask another question: why are the shootings happening in the first place? This seems like an impossible question with a million different answers. However, the only answer needed is the one that holds true for all high school shootings, so perhaps a better question would be: what do all of them have in common?

Didn't he just answer that question? "They do not sleep enough, eat healthily, or bother with developing productive habits. On the contrary, they waste much of their days hunched over a screen, agonizing about their self-image, ignoring their homework, and blaming everyone and everything for their problems. These days, few of them have the luxury of two parents, good friends, or a church community to support them as they cope with the hormonal turbulence of puberty."

Two words: the internet. In the decades preceding Columbine, kids struggled with the same kinds of problems and had the same potential access to guns. They also attended schools that were far easier targets. Nevertheless, far fewer mass school shootings took place and none of them had the body counts that have become normal today. This is because depressed and angry teenagers never became radicalized by countless hours of online propaganda. Today, they can log in instantaneously and learn about various ideologies of hate, educate themselves on maximizing their destructive potential, and desensitize their consciences with pornography and violence. This internet radicalization is essentially the same thing that’s happened with Islamic terrorists all over the Western world.

Sounds like they need help socializing...Per government policy, we've re-defined the American Culture as a negative and encouraged people to create/adhere to their own cultural standards. This is a failure to assimilate to something greater than self, because we lack leadership towards a familial relationship with our fellow man. Instead we have a Lord of the Flies mentality that devalues the Rights of everyone but self. We've weaponized the law to bring about Positive Rights instead of recognizing the value of Negative Rights.

Nah. Has to be the interweb's fault...

“A free people claim their rights, as derived from the laws of nature, and not as the gift of their chief magistrate.”-Thomas Jefferson, 1774

Tweed Ring: "...we should have all done more to elected Republicans..." Agreed

“The children now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise.”-Socrates

They - Young People have exalted notions, because they have not been humbled by life or learned its necessary limitations; moreover, their hopeful disposition makes them think themselves equal to great things - and that means having exalted notions. They would always rather do noble deeds than useful ones: Their lives are regulated more by moral feeling than by reasoning - all their mistakes are in the direction of doing things excessively and vehemently. They overdo everything - they love too much, hate too much, and the same with everything else.-Aristotle

“If a man has a stubborn and rebellious son who will not obey the voice of his father or the voice of his mother, and, though they discipline him, will not listen to them, then his father and his mother shall take hold of him and bring him out to the elders of his city at the gate of the place where he lives, and they shall say to the elders of his city, ‘This our son is stubborn and rebellious; he will not obey our voice; he is a glutton and a drunkard.’ Then all the men of the city shall stone him to death with stones. So you shall purge the evil from your midst, and all Israel shall hear, and fear."-Deuteronomy 21:18-21

“When a boy turns 13, put him in a barrel and feed him through a knot hole. When he turns 16, plug up the hole.”-Mark Twain

"Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." - Albert Einstein

Just a few short posts ago, people were blaming video games for school shootings...

Dr. Mark Griffiths, who has been researching the concept of video gaming disorder for 30 years, said the new classification would help legitimize the problem and strengthen treatment strategies.

"Video gaming is like a non-financial kind of gambling from a psychological point of view," said Griffiths, a distinguished professor of behavioral addiction at Nottingham Trent University. "Gamblers use money as a way of keeping score whereas gamers use points."

He guessed that the percentage of video game players with a compulsive problem was likely to be extremely small—much less than 1 percent—and that many such people would likely have other underlying problems, like depression, bipolar disorder or autism.

WHO's Saxena, however, estimated that 2 to 3 percent of gamers might be affected.

Now the world has categorized the video games as being a mental health disorder. A TWOFER! This is the NRAs wet dream! If only we could build a national mentally unfit prohibited person database to have FFLs check against and hold up voluntary transactions...then we could have safety and freedom!

Sure, it's only "affecting" 2%-3% at the moment (extreme eyeroll), but as "mental unfitness" goes, the drugs and the diagnosis find moar and moar patients.Let's require an ID and a fingerprint when buying video games!

“A free people claim their rights, as derived from the laws of nature, and not as the gift of their chief magistrate.”-Thomas Jefferson, 1774

Tweed Ring: "...we should have all done more to elected Republicans..." Agreed

^ It's more than just about video games: rather, it's a compulsive gaming disorder.

Furthermore, it does not specify which type of games: only that the behavior is compulsive, interrupts "other life interests and activities," with continuation/escalation despite negative consequences.

And currently, it's still hotly debated in the academic/medical community as to whether this is a legitimate diagnosis.

Finally, it's also worth mentioning that there is a current hypothesis that the lack of transparency in the manner in which the WHO's addition of "gaming disorder" to the ICD-10 is itself a reflection of the WHO caving to Asian interests and political pressures. China, Japan, and other Asian countries have long expressed worry over "gaming addiction" in their youth. So, again, if we look to blame video games for the troubles of our young deviants, why are mass killers (even more specifically mass school killers) not a bigger problem in those countries?

After all (and I do have a bit of authority to speak on this, here given that I am a first-generation Chinese/Taiwanese immigrant ), rice-cookers are certainly affordable, readily available, and quite commonly had...and so are vehicles of a certain size.........

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High Power, that's very well quoted.

My feelings are along those lines as well.

As a now middle-aged person, I can recall well both the stupidity of my younger days as well as appreciate the wisdom that my parents have passed down to me.